November 27th, 2015

After just another multi-month hiatus, we're proud to finally publish Episode 39 (now featuring and actual intro music!!!!). This time, we're talking about a whole bunch of different things.

Starting off with a brief discussion on what each of us is currently playing (Kai got back into the Nintendo handheld world while Mark is playing Farcry 4 on his PC), we're getting into SeaweedFS, which looks like as if it's a really cool "NoFS" distributed file system/file storage. Kai's been toying around with it a bit and its technology is based on Facebook's Haystack paper. The paper itself is really worthwhile having a read.

IntelliJ 15 - both our favourite IDE - is out and sure enough both of us upgraded straight away. It's been a really good experience so far and it's an absolutely worthwhile upgrade. We also briefly discuss Jetbrains' licensing changes and the perception/impact of those. While we're talking about Jetbrains, the discussion moves to Kotlin and to Frege, both reasonably new-ish JVM-based languages. Kotlin is an in-house development of Jetbrains and Frege is more or less Haskell for the JVM.

An interesting discussing arose from that - what makes a language a good fit for a certain purpose or audience - and Mark mentioned he saw a talk about "Evidence-Oriented Programming". It's funny how people pretty much "design" languages (and frameworks) by using criteria "I like this" or "This is how I think X should be done" instead of using approaches such as studies, user-tests or other experiments in trying to figure out what works and what doesn't. And while we have this can of worms opened, let's also question that 'computer science' is a proper science. Kai even dug out a 2003 philosophy of sciences paper he wrote during uni while finishing his Masters concluding that computer science overall really is nothing but an engineering discipline and not a science as such.

Both of us have been to various events (Mark as part of his job and poor Kai self-funded...) and particular mentions went to Strange Loop, Clojure/conj and CFCamp. Also - if you're interest in presenting at dev.Objective in Minneapolis next year, the call for papers finished on November 29 - that's in 2 days.

Nearly last but not least, there's another quick public service announcement for the folks who have a particular interest in Google's cloud platform. Mark's started a Google Cloud Platform Podcast that's worthwhile listening to. Also - this was the first recording we've ever done with Google Hangouts on Air and Zencastr. Surprisingly (after all of Kai's really bad experiences with Hangouts) this worked really well and we might use those platforms regularly now.

June 12th, 2015

As announced towards the end of our previous episode, this time we had Geoff Bowers on the show. People might know Geoff from things like Sydney's MXDU resp. webDU conferences, him being the benevolent dictator of the Farcry CMS community and other funky ventures. Also, Geoff's current the secretary of the Lucee Association Switzerland (LAS) and that made him an excellent person to talk to about the Railo fork into Lucee.

This is essentially what this show is about. There's a lot of discussion around the legalities of the fork and the points that various parties made in blog posts or Twitter comment. But - you really need to listen to find out more about all that. We also talk about a few other bits and pieces, such as open-source licenses in a more general way, how to deal with intellectual property of employees and about some events.

Please note that Geoff's audio stream for the first part of the show (until he drops off Skype...) is not the greatest, but it should hopefully still be good enough to get a lot out of it. Sorry for any inconvenience caused.

May 27th, 2015

Mark has arrived in California, so we spend quite a bit of time talking about his experiences over there (mind you, it's been three weeks so far). His new job is a Developer Advocate at Google and given Mark's previous excitement about working with Google Cloud Tech over the last 12-18 months or so, it's fair to assume that this podcast is not ending up being more of an advertorial than it always has been.

We also talked about our ongoing efforts to learn new languages. Kai was playing with Node at dev.Objective() and went through part of the Nodeschool curriculum at an excellent BOF session with Adam Tuttle. Node is clearly an interesting platform, not the least because of the vast amount of available extension modules. Mark has started to learn Haskell in the meantime.

We're back in ~2 weeks and our guest of honour will be Geoff Bowers, Acting Secretary of the Lucee Association Switzerland to fill us in more about Lucee. Hopefully by then I've tried Lucee on a Google Cloud Managed VM and can talk a bit about that, too.

If you have any recommendations for Android- or general Mobile-development-related podcasts, please leave them in the comments.

February 14th, 2015

Oh look, there's another episode of 2DDU podcast...

This time we're talking about a variety of things and personal news. Mark's off to Silicon Valley soon, interviewing for a job at Google. Kai's passed all the written exams for his Commercial Pilot License. Each to their own!

Rust seems to be a language currently going through some hype and Mark had a bit of a play with it. The verdict: Very fluid and full of breaking changes from version to version at this point, but it also has a lot of interesting features: Algebraic Data Types and an interesting memory model to just name a few.

Then there have been some interesting news coming out of the CFML corner. Micha Streit, the inventor and core developer of Railo has forked from Railo 4.2 into Lucee 4.5 and there's lot of good and worthwhile discussion going on over at the new Lucee mailing lists. Adam Cameron's blogposts are worthwhile reading too.

Kai has recently started some serious and commercial Android app development and is raving about the experience for while. Who would ever have though that from an iOS fanboy. Getting into Android development coming from a Java background however is very pleasant and Android Studio certainly helps with it. There's also an interesting Mooc on Coursera.

We're also briefly talking about DB versioning and were wondering what people do about it in real environments. There are various best practices approaches to it, mainly following the concept of "migrations" from the Rails world, but are there any other approaches? Please provide feedback and ideas in the comments after listening... Mark used Sequel in Ruby-land and we briefly mentioned a book on Continuous Database Integration that has a few interesting ideas, too.

Towards the end our discussion swivels towards Docker and Fig. Well, mainly Fig, which seems to be an interesting toolkit to help create customisable and reproducible Docker environments for development setups etc.

September 12th, 2014

After some a quick run through some "things of today" (that Kai clearly won this time), we get started and try to explain what Go is and its place in the universe of programming languages. We ramble on talking about specific features of the language, what individuals like or dislike about it and how each of us uses Go. Towards the end, we're discussing package management issues with Go but then run out of time to dive into more details and a variety of other topics on our list.

However, here's a good amount of links for further reading and on some of the stuff we didn't get to...

Mark realises he's an idiot when it came to immutability and Clojure, and ends up rewriting his library. See this ticket and this blog post for details.

Mark was heading off to CampJS at the time (yep, it was that long ago we recorded this).

Mark talks about Google App Engine (apparently I'm doing all the talking here). What specifically I talk about I can't remember. From the notes it looks like Managed VMs and the Asia Pacific data centre.

Kai tries to tie Heartbleed to ColdFusion. It's doesn't work.

I think that about covers it! I think I'm now going to listen to the podcast again, just so I can remember what we said.

July 17th, 2013

G'day, it's been a while.

Today's episode features our first 2DDU Technology Radar. Oi? What?

The guys at Thoughtworks have recently gained a lot of well-deserved fame for doing their Technology Radar. It's essentially a structured list of "stuff" to use, look at, evaluate or be careful with when it comes to technology. It contains everything from processes via platforms and tools up to specific technologies and languages.

Here's our personal view on technologies: the 2DDU Technology Radar. It's a long episode, nearly 1 hour and 50 minutes. Feel free to agree or disagree with our views in the comments, discussion is very appreciated.

April 20th, 2013

Kai admitted that Mark clearly won "thing of the day" this time, but he's already planning his come back from that loss for episode 31 in about two weeks.

After this unavoidable business of the day we start talking to JD about Raygun.io, a cloud-based service to track unhandled errors in your software. It's a very interesting product that stands out from the competition (according to Mark's 3-minute market research) by supporting a variety of different technologies as well as looking pretty.

The latter triggered a brief interesting discussion on the importance of the user interface, the Novopay debacle in NZ and how enterprise software (the likes of Oracle Forms, Adobe Lifecycle, Microsoft Sharepoint etc) now jump on the HTML5 bandwagon and what we'd expect to happen with that.

JD explains the tech stack Raygun.io has been built upon and it's interesting to see that they've used Mono on an AWS infrastructure for the core parts of the backend. While we're talking about AWS, Kai jumps to Glacier and his experience of backing up into Glacier using a Mac OS X tool called Arq.

The unavoidable Mercurial topic comes up again as well - Kai's got a Mercurial column in Tweet Deck now that's actively being monitored and JD chimes in that he used to use Mercurial a lot in the past because of the lack of good Git tooling on Windows, too. However in the last 12 months that has changed, in particular because of Github providing a lot of good services (if one is willing to still use the command-line). Side note: Atlassian's SourceTree is available on Windows now, too - only supporting Git (and not Mercurial) at this stage though.